cshimmin

22 ms·

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by cshimmin 8y ago
What are you talking about, of course sourcing new endowments allows them to build more things/provide more services/etc. Approximately half of Yale's operating budget comes from revenue generated by its hospital system (whic
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by cshimmin 8y ago
About 65% of students at Yale receive need-based financial aid from the University. Students coming from households making less than $65k don't pay anything at all for tuition/room/board. So clearly some of that endowment mon
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by cshimmin 8y ago
I appreciate that your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but note that what you propose is actually a case of a standard targeted adversarial attack (changing a label prediction from "ped x-ing" to "stop"). This is fundamenta
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by cshimmin 8y ago
Well said. Some particular examples of things we're looking for in this case, however, include supersymmetry, strong gravity / extra dimensions, and dark matter. All of these theories generally can be contrived one way or another
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by cshimmin 8y ago
Roughly, you can actually think of the mass of these fundamental particles being _defined_ by how much they interact with the Higgs field. Higgs bosons themselves interact with the Higgs field, to an extent that their mass comes out to be ~
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by cshimmin 8y ago
Totally sensible, and it's actually probably the easiest way for me to think about it as well :) A proton or neutron has a mass of approximately 1 GeV/c^2. The Higgs boson has a mass of about 125 GeV/c^2 -- so it's total
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by cshimmin 8y ago
Good question! That kind of stuff is a bit out of my area of expertise, but I have asked around my colleagues at CERN and various Unis with more or less the same question. As far as I know, there's nothing too exotic (from a theoretica
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by cshimmin 8y ago
Loop is definitely a technical term. I guess I shouldn't have quoted it? It refers to a Feynman diagram that looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-loop_Feynman_diagram In quantum field theory, perturb
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by cshimmin 8y ago
Sure thing! In broad strokes, the most formal way (in our field's typically frequentist paradigm) to calculate confidence/significance is to build a robust statistical model for your entire experiment (including the random effect
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by cshimmin 8y ago
Well, it's a bit selfish really. It's a terribly interesting outcome as it is, but the particle physicists in the 70's and 80's got to have all the fun.
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by cshimmin 8y ago
I was a bit involved in the ATLAS result. IMHO, it's not really that fancy. Basically, there's a boosted decision tree that is used to select signal-like events, and it was re-optimized some new features and a larger training set.
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by cshimmin 8y ago
ATLAS physicist here -- you're mostly right! The existence of a Higgs boson has been confirmed with extremely high confidence. And this news... it's exciting in the sense that it's an important result, but it's a bit of
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by cshimmin 8y ago
"They called for a life sentence, which in Denmark averages around 16 years and is very rarely handed down for the murder of a single person." What does this mean exactly? That people usually get paroled after 16 years? Or does it
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How Elsevier finds its peer reviewers(forbetterscience.com)
2 points by cshimmin 9y ago|0 comments
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by cshimmin 9y ago
ATLAS collaborator here, I just signed up :) We already have several un-official slack teams, some of which have gained a bit of traction with ~100 users. It seems this might catch on, even if CERN/ATLAS mgmt doesn't officially em
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by cshimmin 10y ago
I am loling, but I think perhaps parent meant to ask "how is it known [... to doctors of audiology]". I.e. how did people determine thay fact. Or maybe he was just being a smartass.
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by cshimmin 10y ago
Actually his story was about trying to explain the difference between left and right in terms of nuclear spin experiments. You also explain that humans greet by shaking their right hands. If you meet the alien and he extends his left hand t
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by cshimmin 10y ago
Portugal is also a _much_ smaller country, with less wealth inequality and systematic racial/socioeconomic divisions related to crime, poverty, drug use, etc. I'm not saying we shouldn't relax the drug laws in the US, but I d
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by cshimmin 10y ago
He's not throwing stones at people, he's throwing them at the company, WoSign. FWIW, I agree. They should have gotten (i.e. paid) someone to write a coherent document for this important communication.
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by cshimmin 10y ago
Wow. Not only an interesting perspective from experience so far removed from my own, but also just really well written. My favorite quote: "Why do gravitate to the eye of the storm? Because in a world with no job security you have to m
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by cshimmin 10y ago
Just take the amount of time you spend per week on hobbies (whether that's reading hn, watching TV, whatever) and add that the the amount of hours you work at your "normal" job. Then you'll understand how (many) scientis
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by cshimmin 10y ago
Hey, as a scientist, if you want to throw more money at science (to attract the population of talented people who are also money-motivated), I'm all for it! It would be interesting to see if it would "trickle down" and make t
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by cshimmin 10y ago
Often times at the bleeding edge of research, that one postdoc is literally the only person in the world who can do both tasks. Also, most research projects are short enough on funding as it is. So what if you declare that this lab either h
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by cshimmin 10y ago
1. That's like saying you couldn't possibly be passionate about cooking a big fancy meal because nobody really enjoys doing the dishes afterwards. If you're not passionate enough about chemistry/cooking to run NMR/d
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by cshimmin 10y ago
Well said but a few details are a bit off. The alternating plates of metal and detector is actually the hadronic calorimeter, which the muons also go straight through (but which stop almost everything else). The muon detectors are outside o
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by cshimmin 10y ago
I am pretty sure it's wrong. I just made a comment about this on the author's article. He claims information N~rm, but for any normal material you have mass proportional to r^3. So N~r^4, not r^2 as the author claims. Black holes
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by cshimmin 10y ago
I have an application where users upload hundreds of small (~10kB) files every day. We quickly realized that S3 was not an option, since you get charged per request. As a workaround we batched the file uploads by archiving uploads each hour
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by cshimmin 10y ago
Not coming in on any side here, but to clarify this "unequivocal" statement was made years before the incident, it sounds like.
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by cshimmin 10y ago
Thanks for the reply! To clarify, you mean to say that a single user-account can be the exact same entity on multiple teams? And so point-to-point communication is not affected by team boundaries? What about server boundaries? Can they be f
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by cshimmin 10y ago
Agreed, I think it's an unfortunate naming choice. As a physicist (and hence also mathematician and programmer) this term is already terribly overloaded. "Slack" is clever because it's not an obscure word but also not so

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